Admittedly, there are very few bright sides for the wedding industry during COVID-19. With local and state mandates changing and couples rescheduling, staying on top of their planning is harder than ever. Fortunately, the one upside for the industry is our ability to work remotely. By and large, most wedding professionals started working from home, meeting with clients whenever and wherever necessary, and growing from there.
As wedding pros, we learned quickly that the average age of the couples we were working with didn’t change much, but we continued to grow older. From texting, blogging, Pinterest, and Instagram, our couples’ thirst for technology and ways to communicate kept many of us young because we needed to keep up or get out. So, in the age of COVID-19 and remote working, most of us already had the digital technology to enable us to work from home.
Working With Aisle Planner
Working with Aisle Planner gives you a leg up for making things work and pivoting your businesses. You have the technology at your fingertips from changing wedding dates and reordering details on the calendar. You're able to easily connect with your teams of professionals and continue to design and create clients' wedding day—often while working from home in various parts of the country. Additionally, you're able to update your online presence and connect with couples who realized they suddenly needed a wedding planner, new venue, or photographer for their pop-up mini-mony. Not to mention, the couples rushing to book 2021 dates before the crush of rescheduled weddings set in.
No Stranger To Remote Planning
For most of us, remote planning is nothing new. Working with busy professionals who can’t always make face-to-face meetings or live out of state is something we’re pretty well versed at doing. Most wedding pros previously have done a few virtual meetings or taken our couples on a facetime tour of a venue. Our planning process working with twentysomethings, for the most part, included click and send contracts and e-signing. We can direct couples to previous weddings at a venue they might be considering or share planning tips with a link to our blogs or online galleries.
Pivoting Your Process
Because a majority of wedding professionals have a defined process that already worked for remote planning and meetings, it typically made it easier to pivot. While many industries scramble to work from home, find new technology, and put a digital process into place, we focused on the "what’s next?" From home, we focused on inventive ways to safely get cake samples to couples and produce menu tastings that were socially distant, with reduced staff. We diligently connected with other pros across the county to look at best practices for safer, socially distant, yet smaller weddings.
Add-On Services
Beyond the process, we brainstormed new business models and add-on services. Offering seating charts for assigned ceremony seating has quickly become the new thing. We’ve seen linen rental companies creating beautiful yet functional masks for couples, wedding parties, guests, and professionals alike. Rental companies can offer couples smaller table sizes to accommodate physical distancing in ballrooms and seating smaller family groupings together. Hedge walls and stanchions are now decorative ways to ensure guests are six-feet apart. Offering micro weddings to accommodate celebrations with immediate family and discussing a postponement package add-on for couples who weren't already booked for full-service planning are just a few ways to capture what's still out there.
It Hasn't Been Easy
We aren't naive enough to think that any of this has been easy. We know that we’ve still got a way to go. But looking forward, working the processes that we already have in place and using all of the digital technology and tools we have available to us will keep us going. While you're working from home, be sure to update your online presence, replace images on your galleries, and look at the services you currently offer. Working together, even at home, we can all get through this!
Hero photo courtesy: Stetten Wilson
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